The 3 Secrets to the Homemade Method™

For most of my life, I was constantly dieting and tortured by my eating.

Now, for the better part of a decade, I have easily maintained my ideal weight and vibrant health, without dieting.

I eat whatever I want, until I am satisfied. And I do all the ‘wrong things’ — like eat carbs, and fat and meat. Yet I never gain weight and I am fit and healthy.

In this article, I am going to share with you the exact 3 secrets that I used to achieve my personal transformation.

These are the same 3 secrets that my team at Homemade Cooking and I have taught to over +1,500 Homemade members to help them lose tens of thousands of pounds, get off meds and reduce blood sugars, pressure & cholesterol.

This approach is so effective that 7 medical clinics have referred patients to us. And we’ve worked with Stanford Hospitals, Stanford University, Google, Da Vita, Hewlett Packard, National Kidney Foundation and many others.

And now, I’m going to share with YOU the 3 Secrets to the Homemade Method— so that you too can finally find freedom from dieting and be your best, healthiest self!

Diets don’t work

If you take 10 people in a room and ask them if they’ve ever been on a diet, 9 hands will go up.

If you ask those 10 people if they succeeded in losing weight on their diet, about half will confirm, yes they did lose weight on their diet. Not bad.

But here’s the biggie: Over 90% of dieters gain all the weight back within a year, and of those, over 30% gain back more weight than they originally lost. Yikes!

I’ve heard this time and time again from thousands of Homemade members & participants: “I succeeded in losing weight on my diet… But then I gained it all back”.

I also know this from personal experience because I used to be a chronic dieter. I was obsessed with losing weight and would go from severely restricted calories to binge eating. I tried everything from fad diets, to special pills, food diaries, counting calories and weighing myself a million times per day.

But the ‘dieting mentality’ never got me anywhere. It caused me endless guilt, disappointment and wasted energy as the numbers on the scale always went back to where they started.

And we blame ourselves for failing. I know I did: I always thought I was just weak, lazy and undisciplined, and vowed to do better next time.

The fact is, that diets don’t work for the vast majority of people in the long term. Anyone can lose weight by reducing calories, restricting what you eat, or starving yourself.

But when you stop, you gain all the weight back — and then some!

Now, if you are looking to lose 5 pounds or 100 pounds, or just to get healthy and improve your blood numbers, let me ask you:

Does any of this sound familiar to you too?

Stop dieting

So, my first piece of advice to you if you are serious about losing weight and transforming your health is this:

STOP DIETING.

Once you drop the dieting mindset, you need to replace it with something totally different.

Something that is not based on cycles of discipline and deprivation followed by guilt and overeating.

Something that is not temporary, but able to be a long-term, enjoyable lifestyle. Because let’s face it, if it’s not easy and doesn’t feel good, you probably won’t stick to it.

At Homemade Cooking, we teach our members a new mindset called eating for Nourishment & Satisfaction™.

When I started eating for Nourishment & Satisfaction™, I stopped dieting and restricting my eating.

I started listening to my body, which took me to fresh home-cooked meals instead of processed foods or packaged ‘health foods’.

I never went hungry again.

And a crazy thing happened:

Instead of gaining weight, it dropped off me.

I achieved my ideal weight and have easily maintained it for over a decade.

So how do you eat for Nourishment & Satisfaction?

It’s easy!

All you need to do is follow the 3 Secrets to the Homemade Method.

Ok, I’m going to share them with you now…

Secret 1: COOK your own food

The first Secret to the Homemade Method is to COOK your own food.

Learning how to cook is the single biggest thing you can do to sustainably lose weight and improve your health.

Here’s why:

Home cooks eat less calories, fats & sugars… without trying

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have confirmed that home cooks use less fat, sugar and salt so they naturally consume fewer calories without dieting.

Most restaurant meals & supermarket meals contain huge portion sizes and are laden with oils, butter, cream, sugars and salt — so you consume a lot more calories without meaning to… or even knowing it! Those extra calories add up over time and cause us to stack on the pounds.

By cooking at home, you naturally eat less calories, fats & sugars — without really trying.

Home cooks eat more of the good stuff

In his book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation,” Michael Pollan argues that the act of cooking itself is the most important thing you can do to improve your diet, more than any specific foods, nutrients, or macro-compositions.

As supporting evidence, he cites a study showing that poor women who cooked often had better diets than wealthy women who didn’t. Cooking is so beneficial that Pollan argues you can “Eat anything you want as long as you cook it yourself”.

The whole, natural ingredients you use in cooking your own food literally contain thousands of nutrients, phytonutrients, minerals & good bacteria which protect you from heart disease, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and so much more.

The processes used by food manufacturers to preserve, refine and heat their products to make them shelf-stable and appetizing to consumers removes, deactivates or kills many of these nutrients & good bacteria.

Cooking is the only way to really control what you put into your body

Cooking your own foods at home helps you to reduce your exposure to many harmful chemicals, preservatives and additives found in store bought foods and fast food.

These ingredients are not only damaging to your waistline but are increasingly acknowledged as causing many chronic diseases (such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and even depression).

For example, the World Health Organization recently added processed meats to its list of cancer causing agents, at Tier 1 — the same level as cigarette tobacco! This includes meats like polony, ham, salami, sausages, and hamburger patties.

Cooking helps you develop a better relationship with food

Cooking is a simple pleasure, and a mindful activity so it can be both fun and relaxing. There is a sense of adventure and accomplishment in creating a dish from scratch. Cooking and sharing food often occurs in a group setting making it an enriching, social activity.

Cooking also enables you to experience the joy of food using all of your senses! The colors, textures, the sounds…and the aromas in the kitchen. All of this helps you to develop a better relationship with food and helps you feel truly satisfied after a good meal.

As Julia Child puts it: “I started cooking when I was 32. Before that I just ate.”

So, the first secret to Life-Changing Cooking is to COOK your own food.

Secret 2: EAT whole, natural ingredients

The second Secret to the Homemade Method is: to EAT whole, natural ingredients, as close as possible to their natural state.

For a long time, we were told that if we wanted to lose weight, we should restrict calories.

They used to say ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’ — meaning, if you wanted to lose weight, you should just eat less calories.

This was the leading approach advocated for decades by the medical and weight loss industries. It was used by companies like Weight Watchers, who encouraged their members to count points.

We now know that the calories approach to weight loss is wrong.

It turns out a ‘calorie does not equal a calorie’, because the human body processes and responds to calories from different sources in different ways.

Meaning the source and quality of your food matters. This is why it’s important to eat whole, natural ingredients — not processed foods or packaged ‘health foods’.

For example, the human body does not respond to 200 calories from a candy bar or from a handful of almonds in the same way.

The candy bar spikes your blood sugar levels, triggering a series of chemical reactions to bring it back down — leading to a drop in energy, and more cravings for sugary, carby foods, even though you don’t actually need more food.

Whereas, the almonds are high in fiber and protein so they provide slow release energy which doesn’t lead to a spike in your blood sugar, as well as containing a host of beneficial nutrients.

The calories approach led everyone to focus on eating less. Not eating right.

I personally recall playing the ‘calories game’: Taking just a bite or two of a candy bar, buying low fat ice-cream, protein bars or baked chips…

And all along it felt wrong.

Because, I knew deep down that none of this food was healthy!

And all the calorie counting and calculating never got me anywhere either.

But here’s the clincher: Eating badly over the long-term actually messes with the very systems designed to control and regulate your hunger and satiety. So it actually gets harder to eat right and stick to your diet because you feel hungry all the time and have constant sugar cravings!

The GOOD NEWS is you can reverse this damage and recalibrate your hunger and satiety regulation systems so they work for you, not against you.

All you need to do is start eating more whole, natural ingredients close to their natural state. Again, that means cooking as much as you can from scratch at home!

Over time, you will experience less cravings, and find you are satiated for many hours after a good meal. You will find a natural, healthy equilibrium — that is not based on calorie counting or deprivation.

So the second secret to the Homemade Method is to EAT a balanced diet of whole natural ingredients, as close as possible to their natural state.

Secret 3: Listen to your body

The third and final Secret to the Homemade Method is to LISTEN to your body.

This is possibly the most challenging, but also the most important & empowering principle.

Listening to your body simply means letting your body — not your mind — dictate what you eat. And when. And how much.

It means reconnecting with your body’s intuitive, innate knowledge of what foods it needs for optimum nutrition, health & weight.

There is a common misconception that evolution works against us in the ‘battle of the bulge’ because humans are evolved to crave fats, sugars and salts, which are now available in abundant quantities.

This is certainly true, but it is also true that our physiological systems were very finely tuned by evolution to maintain a healthy weight and to seek out optimal nutrition because this maximized our chances of survival.

For example:

“Children in research studies selected because of their known, pre-existing vitamin deficiencies, such as a deficiency in Vitamin D were given a choice of several foods: Orange juice (no vitamin D), soda pop (no vitamin D) and cod liver oil (high vitamin D). Most of the kids actually chose the cod liver oil! In other words they seemed to be able to trust their taste buds.”George Mateljan, Author of the World’s Healthiest Foods 2007–2015.

And consider this:

“If you gain 40 pounds of fat over 20 years, that’s an average of two pounds of excess fat accumulation every year- that’s roughly 20 calories extra per day — that’s a bite or two of food, a swallow or two of soda or fruit juice or milk or beer. So why aren’t we all overweight? That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent”. Gary Taubes, author of ‘Why we get fat’ and weight loss blogger.

Your body has the extraordinary ability to regulate your eating to a degree of accuracy of >99% to achieve and maintain a healthy, optimum weight.

The reason people become overweight and sick from reversible, chronic ‘lifestyle diseases’ is not because they listen to their bodies. It’s because humans regularly override the complex systems of hunger and satiety controls and eat refined, processed foods, which break down those systems further.

In other words, we eat for reasons other than hunger. We eat because we are emotional, stressed, tired, have cravings and for a myriad of other reasons.

Many of us are so disassociated from listening to our bodies thanks to the media and weight loss industries, that it can seem quite foreign, and even a little scary to start listening to your body. But learning to listen to your body again is key to achieving a healthy weight and body for life — without dieting.

So, to listen to your body, just ask yourself the following questions next time you want to eat:

Am I truly hungry? If not, can I do something else until it passes?

If I am truly hungry, then what is most nourishing and healthful way to satisfy my hunger right now?

It takes time and patience to master and it is definitely a journey not a destination! But the end result is worth it: Finding freedom from dieting and a lifetime of eating for Nourishment & Satisfaction™.

So that is the third Secret to the Homemade Method: LISTEN to your body.

Stop Dieting, Start Cooking: TODAY!

So if you’ve had enough of dieting — losing weight only to gain it all back again — then why not try something totally different? STOP DIETING!

Change your mindset and let go of the ‘dieting mentality’ completely with it’s cycles of deprivation, discipline, guilt and regret.

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AboutAnna Rakoczy,Co-Founder

Anna is the Co-Founder & Chief Instructor of Homemade Cooking. She has Masters Degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley and is a Fulbright Scholar. Anna presented at the Food Summit in 2013, the [email protected] Conference in 2014 and the Berkeley Food Innovation Lab, and has spent thousands of hours coaching Homemade members to lose tens of thousands of pounds, and reverse chronic medical conditions.

About Homemade Cooking

At Homemade Cooking we’ve helped over +1,000 members to lose tens of thousands of pounds and reverse high blood sugars, pressure & cholesterol – without dieting, deprivation or guilt. We’ve partnered with Standford Hospitals, Standford University and 7 medical clinics have referred patients to us, because our simple system is proven and it works. We’ve also worked with companies like Google, Hewlett Packard & Da Vita as well as the National Kidney Foundation.